AKC

Here's the problem with simply "adding up" draft picks. In your unweighted system, the Bills can draft 3 DL with the 60th pick in three drafts, and you consider that to be three times more valuable than picking a DL once with the first pick in the draft. Consequently, your results are not simply misleading, they're false. We know a pick at 12 is more critical than a pick at 46, among the reasons being the money that the team must commit to the earlier pick. I'm looking at this from the standpoint of how much total equity each Super Bowl team individually have in the draft compared to the Bills, and then positionally how that equity was spent. This allows a quantification of the importance each team places at each position. You might honestly argue that you want to see the methodology of mine expanded, but you can't make any intellectually honest argument that the unweighted sum you've arrived at gives any evidence of how teams are approaching the draft positionally from their highest pick on down the board.

My study quantifies an equity for each pick, with the first pick in the draft being worth more than the second, and so on. Anyone honestly considering the subject would agree that this approach is necessary to consider equity. Your premise is, with all due respect, idiotic if trying to determine the equity of picks and hence their importance. You have the 46th pick in the draft being of an equal value to the 1st pick, and that is not only unrealistic, it's virtually useless. If you want to honestly talk about draft pick equity, you must offer some form of quantification. I've done that, and in the most logical way. Let's see your system.

In and of itself, the fact that some clear difference between our actions positonally at the top of the draft versus the best teams in the game might simply be discounted as consequential, but that evidence is just the beginning. I see premium quality DTs being passed in the draft by the Bills to take other positions. Haloti Ngata passed by in favor of a Safety? I have to say I find that fundamentally an error in the overall strategy of Buffalo. That's a little difficult to ignore. Do you think we'd be a different team today if instead of taking Lee Evans in 2004, we had selected Tommie Harris? We ended up STARTING Justin Bannon. We had the need- Harris was rated one of the best players in that draft- and we ended up with Lee Evans. It's hard to imagine we couldn't have waited another turn to pick up an undersized WR. But our team has NOT seen the need for DT like the good contemporary teams have. How you can sit in a division getting whipped by a team twice a year, a team who has used 3 first round picks for DTs in the past 8 drafts, and not notice that we're undermanned inside? I for one will no longer ignore it. The piss-poor gamble that Stroud represents may get the casual observer giddy, but it shouldn't get students of the contemporary NFL game feeling great about our '08 prospects. The way to beat the better teams today is with great defensive interiors, and entering the 2008 campaign, calling our great should be accompanied with a good burst of howling hysteria.

Feel free to add to the results. The methodology is included. I frankly didn't care about how we draft versus other failures; I'm interested in how the best front offices do it versus my team. My study was done as a way for me to quantify what is not exactly clear when you simply look at all #1 picks just as a #1 picks, and ignore where in the round the pick is made, plus providing a quantification of how each team's individual draft record showing how they got to the big game in recent years was done on a per position equation. Can we add to it- sure- we can add more information and broaden the results. The bottom line is that I can see fairly well what I was hoping would become clear- that our front office simply doesn't believe that top DL talent is any more important, or even possibly is less important than talent at WR and RB. And the record is perfectly clear that the best teams do feel top DL talent is a better value with their top picks than stockpiling early round equity in WRs and RBs.

Here's a study with detail, done prior to us ADDING to our ante at WR in the 2008 draft: Studying the drafting trends of the way Super Bowl teams approach the Top of the Draft versus the Buffalo Bills (one of only 4 teams in the NFL to have missed the playoffs this Millennium) may offer some insight into why we’ve been one of the consistently bad teams in the league for an extended period of time. Using the draft records of Super Bowl teams allows a look into how those teams have “budgeted” at specific positions at the Top of the Draft. This study does not establish whether these Positional Budgeting Trends are a conscious strategy on the part of all or any of the teams in the study, but the trends do represent contrasts between the players Super Bowl teams target at the Top of the Draft versus the positions the Buffalo Bills have been drafting. The methodology used for the study follows the primary trending results. A comparison of Super Bowl Draft Budgets versus the Bills looks like this: Super Bowl Teams: Giants, Colts, Steelers, Pats*, Bears, Seahawks, Eagles, Panthers: % of Draft Top of the Budget by Position: Super Bowl Teams DL 23% DB 21% WR 14% OL 12% TE 9% RB 8% LB 7% QB 6% Bills DL 16% DB 20% WR 18% OL 12% TE 0% RB 20% LB 6% QB 8% A few substantial differences in tendencies: Buffalo has used 59% of its draft budget in the study period for Offensive players, while the Super Bowl Team Draft Budgets favor Defensive selections more often than Offensive. Buffalo has “outspent” the Super Bowl teams at RB and WR while “under spending” them at TE and DL. This makes the following areas those in which Buffalo most widely bucks the Top of the Draft Trends of Super Bowl teams: A) Bills have a higher Top of the Draft spend on Offense than Defense, contrary to the trend with Super Bowl teams B) Bills have no TE selection at the top, whereas all but one Super Bowl team has spent a portion of their Top of the Draft Budget on the position. C) Bills have spent a higher ratio of their budget on WRs versus DL, bucking the Super Bowl team trend of loading up on DL at the Top of the Draft Every Super Bowl team except the Seahawks has a higher DL spend than they do at WR. The DL/WR ratio favoring the DL is common among 87.5% of the Super Bowl Teams. Buffalo is already out of balance on this trend, and a selection of a WR with the #11 pick this season would put us at a nearly 1:2 DL/WR ratio, a stark contrast to the almost 2:1 ratio favored by the Super Bowl Teams on average. (The ratio favoring DL over WRs is also a trait of recent playoff teams like the Cowboys, the Chargers and the Packers). Every Super Bowl Team except the Panthers has a Top of the Draft investment in the TE position except the Carolina Panthers. The Bills have none. Super Bowl teams are spending over 23%- or almost a quarter of their Top of the Draft Budget- on DL, while the Bills have committed less than 16%. In order to compile usable information for the study, the following reasonable stipulations were adopted in order to establish a study group and time window: 1) Top of the Draft- This is represented by the first two rounds. The players selected in these two rounds represent the prospects that NFL teams have concluded are the best talent entering the league from college each season. 2) Draft Budgeting- To establish a position by position numerical score for each team, the study uses the sum of the specific draft choices in which each team selected players at each position during those first two rounds. In order to end up with a highest to lowest sum, the selections were counted inversely. Since there are 32 team picks in each round each of the first 64 picks is assigned the inverse of its position, with draft pick #1 being given a numerical score of 64 points, draft pick #2 counting for 63, etc. 3) Compensatory picks- Compensatory picks following the 64th pick of the draft were counted as 1 point in each case. 4) In establishing a window to study successful draft budgeting, the average number of years first round draft picks average playing for their original team (6-7) was used. The past 7 drafts were those considered. 5) “Super Bowl Teams” will be NFL teams who have won their Conference Championships over the past 5 seasons. This allows the Super Bowl rosters to have two mature draft classes entering the study and limits teams declining from bad contemporary drafting over the study window like the Super Bowl Raiders following the 2002 NFL Season. 6) Positions- Positions are defined by: DL, DB, WR, OL, TE, RB, LB and QB. 7) Percentages- Percentages are carried to the closest whole number.

I'm not merely pointing out "examples", I'm pointing out absolute disasters that have left us non-competitive. DT has become one of- if not the- most important position in the NFL today. Smart and successful teams continue stocking young, premium talent at their D interior, while we keep on stocking up on RBs and WRs and settling for lesser DTs in the draft and old, arguably twilight players in FA. About midseason we'll see how well the "Bill's and Lion's approach" is paying off. My guess is we'll be watching those teams who've put big early draft investments in their OLine setting their playoff strategies while our highly paid WRs and RBs are making January vacation plans.

That's all you're doing is playing a game, and not a very enlightened one. I'm talking about top of the draft Tommie Harris/Haloti Ngata talent, and you're wasting bandwidth talking about 3rd round/Tim Anderson talent. Go ahead and compare it all you want, but it won't get you any closer to understanding why the best teams in football clean our clock on the field and at the draft.

The Bills have NOT made the same commitment to big young bodies that the best team's have, and that's just the point. In 2006, we went with a DB and allowed the Baltimore Ravens behind us to draft Haloti Ngata, who has already become the dominant player on their defensive line. While we were desperate for a quality DT, we passed up a dominant one and settled for Jon McCargo later in the round. In 2004 we passed on Tommie Harris, who went right out to help Chicago get to the Super Bowl. A dominant gap splitting DT, the kind that makes all the difference in the game today, but instead we ended up with a WR. In need of a DT, we went on the cheap and drafted Tim Anderson in the 3rd instead of doing what winners do. The Buffalo Bills have passed on the best talent at DT in the draft in favor of positions like WR and RB that the best teams don't draft at the same frequency. Thats because the best teams put a higher priority on keeping their DLines full of the best talent in football. Why has NE used 3 of it's 1st round picks this decade on DTs? Let me tell you, it sure as heck isn't because they didn't have any needs at positions like WR. But they simply understand that you can get WR talent addressed by other means, but DT talent comes at the top of the draft. I just wish my team would figure it out too.

You have the full support of the Detroit Lion and Buffalo Bills front offices. Now as to the good teams in football, they actually have a plan. It includes getting young big bodies for their defensive lines early in the draft, and letting teams like the Lions and Bills get their fan bases all hot and bothered when they sign declining older DTs instead.

Since I have yet to see anyone advocating making picks by position alphabetically, you’ll excuse me if I’m a little cynical when I see you insist that “it’s about drafting good players”. So let me give you the benefit of the doubt and simply point out that it’s pretty obvious to anyone with any understanding of the draft that you of course need to scout well. The question about positional drafting patterns goes to another factor- what premium does position play in determining a player’s value, and what are the good teams doing that we aren't? There are clear and inarguable differences between the way recent Super Bowl teams draft by position in the first two rounds versus the way the Lions and Bills have drafted. For one thing, the best teams have spent a higher percentage of that high draft equity at DT and TE, whereas the Bills and Detroit have spent higher on WR and RB. So the real question is, are the Bills more like all of the fans who don’t recognize the pattern? The results show very specifically at the DT position that we’ve been missing the boat. We’ve let 3 of the most dominant DTs in the league get by us and drop to teams below us while we were buttering up our roster at WR and RB. The pattern is there. You can take a look or ignore it; that’s your choice. But for anyone who would like to know why hitting .500 has become our annual goal, this seems like a pretty likely place to find some of the answers.

I'm growing to recognize that 7-9 is pretty much being "screwed" ;-)

The press so far is that they claim we're going to play a pure Cover-2 with a pair of 3 techniques as the base D. I'm thinking myself that the Tampa 2 "upgrade" was the version with the success in the league- a 0/1 at NT and a 3 at UT. Tampa/Chicago/Indy all made the stage playing it that way. It strikes me as very strange that if you want to be the first to do it with two 3s on the field you'd pick a declining Marcus Stroud as the premier DT in your rotation- just from the burst standpoint. I have to assume the ideal in the "double 3" interior would rely on two guys with an exceptional initial 3 steps, and Stroud's last few campaign's say he's definitely not that guy. But maybe that is the Johnson role- we give up big runs with some regularity but we balance that with a lot of 3rd and 9s. Seems incredibly risky but it might be the best, and most likely, use of the talent on the roster. And no doubt, McCargo, no matter the (substantial) size of his lower body, still plays above his waist and therefore will always be a 3. Funny thing is that Williams- with maybe 1/4 the athleticism of McCargo, is a natural playing low, but we've so far been asking him to play high! Maybe they allow him to go back to his natural technique this year. He could prove to be the better DT pick from that draft if he is encouraged to submarine the OLine as a prominent member of the rotation. The bad news is it doesn't fit the scheme we're being fed publicly.

If Stroud were only going to have to play 25% of the downs the season, he'd have a heck of a lot better chance of being in 16 games than he has the way I think they're intending to use him, which is on rushing downs. Some defenses limit rushing downs- we're at this moment a defense that invites them. If we assume (IMO logically, but I haven't seen him play yet and don't know if he has an exceptional ground-holding technique for a DE-sized DT) that there's little chance they intend to use the 275 pound Johnson as a regular in the rotation on rushing downs, we should see a lot more reps for Stroud as long as the rush is a big threat to us each game. I don't think anyone expects the AFC East to change in 2008 to a passing conference. Problem is that Marcus effectively played UT in the Jag's scheme and was never the run stopper. The effect of a great gap push on rushing downs in the Cover-2 is clear- make consistent tackles in the backfield while giving up occasionally the bigger run and upset the ultimate down/distance rythym of the offense, but winning with the odds on that is a big gamble. It's incredibly optimistic to imagine seeing the Stroud of 2002/3, especially when he'll hardly be playing next to John Henderson in anything but a few Bills' fan fantasies.

In order to believe the hoax that it's about "picking the right players" versus understanding where you get the most for your draft dollar at each position, you have to ignore our long term RB/WR draft priority and how different it is when compared to the DT/TE priority of most of the top teams in the league. Ignore it if you like, but there's no need attacking any of us who are paying attention. That's great since it creates no conflicts with my thing for attractive ladies my own age ;-) BTW- Is the kid ready for his 2008 season?

Right brain. The one that is dominating whenever one feels they've discovered rational logic in a VOR post. I'm not clear on your opinion regarding the use of high picks at positions where the bust rates are higher and the rewards of the pick might have been as easily or even more easily achieved by drafting the same position later. WR is one of those where the evidence shows a 2nd rounder is just as likely to end up a big-time producer as a 1st. OLine interior, TE, DLine interior and LB all have lesser bust rates than RB, and RB has proven to be one of the easiest positions to fill (and quickly in most offenses) via FA/trade. Getting the superior interior rushing presence that has become the signature of the winning franchises in the league today came in most cases from the use of high draft picks. Buffalo has used far more of it's top draft equity in the RB position than the best teams in the game, to the tune of about twice as much. Is that a symptom of doing things the wrong way or is it just a coincidence? At some point in this "toying with a .500 record" stretch I think it is prudent to begin to ask these kinds of questions about our strategy. Our higher use of top draft equity at WR when it's the #1 bust position in the draft is a good place to start the study, and our near total disregard of the TE positon at the top when IIRC EVERY top team in the league has used a top pick for the position also stands out as something we may very well be doing wrong.

You're right, I'm probably underestimating the intelligence of the average Bear.

Bears are assumed to have an Intelligence Quotient of about 10-12 points on the human scale. You insult them with your self-flattery. Even a Bear with an I.Q. of 12 would be able to hold his thought pattern better than you have here; you insisted there were no "noteworthy" examples of RBs not drafted in the first round. I proved your statement to be utter nonsense. With your next self-comparison you might do much better by drawing from among the extinct bird species.

Yeah, among the 4 leading rushers in the NFL last season were 3rd round pick Bryan Westbrook and UNDRAFTED Willie Parker. But apparently that's not "noteworthy" if you're insistent on being recognized as the number one source of hot air on TSW.

No doubt some of his most celebrated games were blessed with an awful lot of "coin tosses" that landed in his favor, but that risk-taking was his game- and I agree it's among the reasons he has been among the best in the league. He's also proven to have the "follow me" intangible that's desirable at the point guard spot in this league.

One of the board morons conjured up that argument because he couldn't grasp the clear record that shows the best teams don't pass on premier DT talent at the top of the draft. My position remains the same it's been for years- we've passed on at least 3 top DTs in recent drafts and our team is still hurt by it more than any other personnel decisions that've been made on or off the field in contemporary times. Knuckleheads who can't intellectually grasp the the facts are left putting a moron's spin on it like that "D Linemen early = good team". If you want to study and learn about the best teams, you'll recognize that drafting GOOD interior D line talent early leads to long periods of respectable football product on Sundays, something we haven't seen in Buffalo in way too long. The media and most fans love "skill position" players, and the league promotes them over the reality on the ground in the NFL. But in the back rooms of the teams who whip our butts with regularity, there's surely a good laugh every time we let a good DT talent drop to one of those better teams down the board in favor of a RB or WR, positions the best teams know can be filled other ways. DT is at the top of the best team's draft priority at the top of the draft, while the Bill's have drafted more like the Lions than our toughest competition. It's kept us in the bottom half of the league and outside of blind optimism the partial move forward taken in this past off-season is probably reflected pretty fairly by the ESPN assessment. We may have moved forward 4 or 5 spots with the moves, but anyone who thinks we have a defensive interior that in any way resembles the depth and quality of the best teams is a fool.

Entering the 2002 season, ESPN ranked the Defensive line of the Tampa Bay Bucs one of the best in the NFL.

It is clear that they are assessing teams based not only on the quality of starters but the quality of the depth of their rotations. There are a number of 3-4 teams at the top of their board who have better quality of depth than we do as a 4-3 team, and consequently they recognize that we might be a little bit better than the bottom-of-the-league line that we fielded last year, but there’s a huge gap between us and the best teams in football. This gap is the one that will only be filled by adding another quality DT to our rotation. While we have some small percentage of our fan-base who went Pollyanna on the moves of the off-season, this is a more reasonable assessment. And it’s the #1 cause for concern about once again being pushed down the field for much of the 2008 campaign as we once again paid too little attention to what IMO is the single most important position in the contemporary NFL.

We get that completely- but the posters in this forum claiming to represent the Pats* have been nearly wholly of the group whose first Pat's* jersey says Brady* on the reverse. We can use posters from other teams who've actually been their fans for life, like most of us on this board. We've had good contributions over the years from other team fans, but the current crop of Pat's* fan "contributions" has been a bunch of know-nothing garbage from bandwagoneers who will move on to their next favorite team in the near future. Stick around and we might find some football to talk about.

Don't let me discourage that Fantasy Football thinking, but in the 2008 NFL we're hardly competitive with the good teams at the position. As long as offenses are reducing the length of their passing games, quality and depth at DT will continue to become more and more important. In some of our opinions, it's already become the most important position in the NFL, and based on the drafting records of the best teams there's no secret among them about how to build a winner. But then again there will always be the Matt Millen types who think adding an aging and declining-for-years DT plus a 275 pound sub who hasn't sacked anyone since the first month of the 2007 season could all of a sudden magically transform one of the worst D interiors in football to among the elite. The fact is we're razor-thin at DT when compared to the better competition, and that's assuming Stroud plays far better than he has over the past three seasons. Seem like a pretty sizable "wish sandwich" to this fan of the Buffalo Bills.

No one who has ever actually keyed on Ngata's play as a Pro would promote such utter nonsense- McCargo as somehow the equal of Ngata? Ngata controls the whole flow of his own defense and the opposing offense is forced to play around him. This kind of misunderstanding of the game of football demonstrates the confusion some have about the contribution to the overall defense that's made at the DT position. You have Ngata, a dominant force who allows his 10 teammates to do things they would not otherwise be free to do with a lesser player in front of them, making his defense better with his domination, and at the same time we have a fan, who for his desire to promote his lack of understanding, seeks to diminish Ngata's contributions by making the claim that statistics show something that play on the field has proven to be a laughable premise- that John McCargo has in any way been the equal of Haloti Ngata up to this point in their careers.